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Mystery of Missing Mushrooms Leaves French Blaming Roma

Some French mushroom pickers, disappointed by low yields, say that foreigners are at fault.Credit
Nanda Gonzague for The New York Times

PARIS — Guy Sant is distressed about the sorry state of his mushroom business this year. Usually in the autumn, when the weather turns brisk and the leaves begin to fall, his pickers gather 60 tons of wild fungi to satisfy European consumers, he said. This fall, they found only 16 tons. “I lost so much this year, I may have to close,” he said bleakly.

Mr. Sant, who runs Cevennes-Truffes, a mushroom company based in St. Anastasie in southern France, says he knows who to blame: outsiders, mostly from Eastern Europe, who at the behest of sellers in Spain have come across the border and hauled away wild mushrooms by the truckload. Even the way the outsiders picked the mushrooms made it unlikely they would grow again next season, he said.

While experts dispute that last claim, it is revealing both of one of the more idiosyncratic corners of the French psyche, in which wild mushrooms are viewed as a national patrimony, and also of the frustrations of some French as a borderless Europe opens once exclusively French domains to new economic competitors.

That competition has brought with it darker undercurrents of discrimination and hostility toward the European Union’s newest — and poorest — citizens from Bulgaria and Romania, and especially the Roma, who are a minority of 20,000 in France. In recent months, France’s interior minister called for the Roma to be expelled and a 15-year-old Roma girl was taken off a school bus in front of classmates and deported with her family.

The Roma are easily blamed for a range of ills, but while a number of the mushroom pickers are Roma, not all of them are, according to Roma advocates. And while some of the mushrooms are being picked illegally, many are not. How the mushroom is picked matters little, experts say. The real distinction is who gets the money and the volumes involved.

While frustrated, Mr. Sant is also sympathetic. Newly arrived Eastern European migrants, including Roma, work under poor conditions for a pittance, he said, but in the process, they are depriving French like him who have made gathering wild mushrooms a thriving business. The quantity of mushrooms being trucked to Spain has become so large that French mushroom companies are suffering.

Photo

Wild mushrooms are readily found in the forests of southern France.Credit
Nanda Gonzague for The New York Times

“From the mushrooms’ perspective, I don’t think they care if they are picked by a native or by someone who is not French and takes them to another country,” said Thomas Kuyper, a professor of fungal ecology and diversity at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

The claim that mushrooms were being picked incorrectly, he said, was more about xenophobia and anger about losing business, noting that there were similar attitudes in the Netherlands toward pickers from Germany and Poland. “Are people worried for the mushrooms or about the foreigners?” he asked.

For the French, gathering mushrooms is no joking matter. Like jealous lovers, many keep secret the prize patches of woodland they forage from year to year, and even refuse to tell relatives where they pick. So, when people who are not French take the mushrooms, it seems to upset what some see as the natural order of things.

Jean Carle, president of Champi-Fruits des Bois, an association of landowners whose properties produce wild mushrooms, says “invaders” are stealing the precious cepes (porcini mushrooms) and “organized gangs” are ravaging the locally beloved lactaria deliciosa, known as milk caps. The extent to which the outsiders are breaking the law is unclear.

Picking mushrooms on private land constitutes trespassing; on public land, there are varying rules. In some areas, local government entities charge a fee if a person picks more than four pounds a day, but in other areas, there are no charges.

Romanian and Bulgarian citizens, who are allowed to come to France as members of the European Union, are required to have residency permits to work. Those doing the clandestine picking come into France from Spain, though they are Bulgarian or Romanian citizens, French officials said. “Everyone is allowed to take a walk in the woods, but they are gathering astronomical quantities,” Mr. Carle said.

Jean Louis Traversier of the French forest service estimates that more than 80 percent of this year’s harvest of 50 tons of mushrooms in just the southeastern Drôme and Ardèche regions were taken by Romanian and Bulgarian citizens to Spain. Locals tend to describe them all as Roma, but officials, including Mr. Traversier, say it is not possible to conclude that from their passports.

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Carine Bar, who sells wild mushrooms at a farmers’ market in Paris, says she avoids buying from unknown purveyors, even though they offer their mushrooms at a fraction of the regular price.Credit
Agnes Dherbeys for The New York Times

The Bulgarians and Romanians, including Roma, first came to pick for a Spanish company in 2004-5 to harvest milk cap mushrooms, which are prized in Spain for making tapas and flavoring oil, Mr. Traversier said. The influx of outsiders, he said, was an understandable result of Spain’s faltering economy, adding that he felt badly for the Roma laborers whom he believes are “picking to survive.”

Mr. Traversier said that while the Spanish company paid the regional government’s fee, the foreign pickers began to come back on their own to pick without paying, and their numbers multiplied. “This phenomenon has been developing since they opened up European borders,” he said.

This year, he said, about a thousand workers from Romania and Bulgaria came into the region by night in minivans or small trucks stacked high with empty boxes. He said they parked on narrow local roads and slipped into the forests or hiked to the high plateaus and camped for as long as three weeks, building makeshift campsites and rising in the damp, chilly mornings to hunt for wild mushrooms. They hid their haul in the woods, and trucks came by each evening to pick them up, he said.

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Marie-Thérèse Bonnet said her sister, who owns property in the Haute-Loire region, was troubled by foreign mushroom pickers last year. She minced few words in describing her views.

“To be frank, they are Roma, and they camp in the forest and cut our trees to make shelters for themselves, trees that were two decades old,” Ms. Bonnet said. “They built seven huts — it takes four or five trees per hut. Afterwards we found old shoes, old pants, old cans.”

Some greenmarket purveyors refuse to sell “Roma mushrooms,” said Carine Bar, who sells 10 varieties of wild mushrooms at the expensive farmers’ market on Avenue du Président Wilson in Paris. She said she avoided buying from unknown purveyors she believed were Roma, even though they offered their mushrooms at a fraction of the regular price. Her fear is that if one of her customers fell ill, she would not be able to trace the mushroom’s provenance because the seller would have moved on, she said.

Advocates for the Roma say they are being unfairly singled out, noting that not all Romanian and Bulgarian citizens are Roma and that not all Roma are necessarily trespassers, transients or thieves.

“They are wrongfully accusing the Roma community,” said Francine Jacob, vice president of the French Union of Gypsy Associations. “Delinquency exists — that we cannot deny — but it’s not systematic.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 28, 2013, on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Mystery of Missing Mushrooms Leaves French Blaming Roma. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe